Kubernetes vs Amazon ECS: The best Container Orchestration

As you may know, there are many orchestration tools to manage and scale micro-services. But, in this case, we are going to talk about the two biggest mechanisms: Kubernetes vs Amazon ECS.

In this blog we’re going to review each one of them individually, in the same way, we’re going to talk about their the pros and cons and in the end, decide which one is the right container orchestration tool for your web application depending on your company’s needs.

Let’s start!

Kubernetes vs Amazon ECS: They are both cluster management systems that help Microservice applications to be managed, deployed, autoscaled, and networked among containers.

On one side, Kubernetes is a container orchestration service that uses Docker and it’s hosted in the Cloud. It was developed by Google, which has an important community and is widely used.

On the other hand, Amazon ECS is a container orchestration tool that enables applications to scale up. Continuously, it creates more containers in order to run the application processes as the demand increases.

Both tools have positive and negative sides at the time of adopting one of them, hence the importance of reviewing them in order to make a good choice depending on what you are looking for in your business.

Features: Kubernetes vs Amazon ECS

Costs

Organizations aspire to reduce IT costs without compromising quality or agility, right?. So, Kubernetes usually is more expensive than Amazon ECS; one strong argument from Kubernetes, is that it requires at least two servers, and that, will cost you a good amount of money from the hosting side.

And not just that, if we go deeper into your organization, with Kubernetes on-prem, the likely work efforts are 2X; that’s because of its complexity in the configuration, deployment, and maintenance.

Even with Kubernetes in the Cloud, for example (Azure Kubernetes Service or Amazon Kubernetes service), it will take you around 20% more time to manage it in full.

Regarding Amazon ECS, which is a service that doesn’t have a cost, except for the costs associated with the instance that is assigned to the service, similarly, it can be as little as a small instance.

Multi-cloud

Well, this is obvious, and the winner is Kubernetes. A compelling reason is that it can be deployed on-prem or any cloud provider, including Azure, Google Cloud, or Amazon.

In the case of ECS, the platform is closed code; as a consequence, it has a vendor lock-in and is not cloud-agnostic.

Easy to operate

In this case, Amazon ECS is your best option. The ECS ecosystem is already preconfigured. Actually, it is an Amazon service which doesn’t require a full setup. Additionally, it takes the most challenging parts so that you can focus on a few configurations.

Alternatively, Kubernetes has an intense configuration process, and it requires an appropriate amount of hours to make it work.

Availability and scalability

Both platforms cover the features at the same level, but clearly, Amazon ECS has benefits inherently since they can be deployed in different availability zones VS Kubernetes on-prem, which will take you a fair amount of time to replicate similar approach with multi-region/zones, etc..

Deployments

With Amazon ECS, the native deployment system is rolling updates. As well as the other deployment strategies like Canary and blue-green deployments, they can be incorporated in your CI-CD process, but with the reinforcement of Amazon Code deploy.

On the other hand, Kubernetes per se doesn’t have multiple deployments systems, such as rolling updates, canary deployments, etc. BUT except for blue/green deployments, that frankly, works flawlessly with Kubernetes.

To conclude

Now that we had taken a closer look at each tool and we had made the comparison Kubernetes vs Amazon ECS, the time has come to decide which container orchestration tool is your best option!

If you’re looking for Multi-cloud, definitely Kubernetes is the right choice, but if you’re looking to reduce IT labor and hosting costs and management, then you should opt for Amazon ECS!